After my trip to the National Archives in Washington DC last month to research my Grandpa Cheshire's death at Pearl Harbor, I felt a little deflated not to have found anything new. But I did get some promising leads and I plan to follow up those leads. To be continued....
And then who should pop in the news but my Tudor ancestors' old nemesis Richard III! The discovery
of his remains in a parking lot in England reminded me of the fascinating story of how my ancestor William John Gardiner
was reportedly the man who struck the fatal blow to Richard III.
From
recent news reports:
“Richard
died at Bosworth on 22 August 1485, the last English king to fall in battle,
and the researchers revealed how for the first time. There was an audible
intake of breath as a slide came up showing the base of his skull sliced off by
one terrible blow, believed to be from a halberd, a fearsome medieval battle
weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a
wooden pole, which was swung at Richard at very close range. The blade probably
penetrated several centimetres into his brain and, said the human bones expert
Jo Appleby, he would have been unconscious at once and dead almost as soon.”
The
search for Richard III’s final resting place was organized by screenwriter
Philippa Langley of the Richard III society. As far as she is concerned,
Richard was the true king, the last king of the north, a worthy and brave
leader who became a victim of some of the most brilliant propaganda in history,
in the hands of the Tudors' image-maker, Shakespeare.
My ancestor was a Welshman named William
John Gardiner (1450 – 1495) who married Helen Tudor – the illegitimate first
cousin of Henry VII. Why William John (Gardynyr) Gardiner was allowed to
marry into the Royal Family remains unclear, but historians have hinted that it
was because of his aid to Henry VII, then Earl of Richmond, in defeating
Richard III, in the Battle of Bosworth Field, near Leicester. According
to the book, THE MAKING OF THE TUDOR DYNASTY, by Roger Thomas, William killed
Richard III, on August 22, 1485, allowing Henry VII to proclaim himself King of
England. William and Helen Tudor were allowed to marry a few months
later. His future wife Helen Tudor was the illegitimate daughter of Jasper Tudor, the
uncle of Henry VII.
After The Church of England was formed
under the reign of Henry VIII in the 1500’s, the Gardiners remained loyal to the
Catholic Church. Eventually, our Gardiner ancestors moved to Maryland in
1637. Maryland had been founded in 1634 as a colony where Catholics could
enjoy freedom from religious persecution. Janette Gardiner
(1740 - 1799) married Richard Mudd (1735 - 1794) and some of their many
children immigrated to the Catholic Holy Lands of Kentucky around 1800 for land
and religious freedom. Our ancestor Nicholas Mudd’s daughter Susanna Mudd
married Thomas J. Cheshire in 1834 in Nelson County, KY.
